Restoration of Degraded Landscapes: Lessons from Northern Ethiopia

Addressing the root causes of poverty and environmental degradation through restoring degraded areas using proper soil and water conservation, reforestation, afforestation, grazing land management practices, etc., has been one of the development priorities in Ethiopia. To this end, community-led watershed-based land restoration and natural resource management (NRM) programs have been imple-mented and have brought some desired changes in the landscapes of Tigray, northern Ethiopia. However, the land restoration successes have not been studied for scaling up. The aim of this chapter is to review the participatory and integrated watershed-based land restoration efforts and practices in northern Ethiopia and to draw lessons for better understanding so as to scale out to similar agro-ecologies. This chapter reviews the historical process of landscape restoration in Tigray and discusses key factors, especially, direct and indirect benefits of land restoration, which contributed to sustainable adoption and scale-up. Comparing the land restoration approaches before and after the 2000s, this chapter highlights the importance of enabling institutions including coordinating programs and policies for extension approaches among key stakeholders on watershed restoration, as well as establishing and enacting local bylaws for the mobilization of community members, including women, the elderly, and youth.

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